Sánchez avoids a political clash and tries to put agreements on track in his meeting with Meloni

“We do not come to highlight the differences, we come to weave consensus”, they allege in Moncloa. And, with this bottom line, Pedro Sánchez has called on Spain and Italy to “work together” to “get closer to the dream of a more united and fairer Europe”, in his first meeting in Rome with the Italian Prime Minister, the far-right leader Giorgia Meloni. The PSOE leader has at all times avoided a political clash with the far-right leader.

“A decade ago, an unfair and wrong response to the financial crisis divided Europe in two, between the north and the south”, Sánchez highlighted before Meloni. “But the response to the war in Ukraine has not divided us between east and west, because we have responded together,” he said.

The head of the Spanish Executive has called to “close the gaps of the past and create a Europe of only one speed”. “A more balanced, more powerful and more sovereign Europe. That it be capable of facing the great challenges of our time, such as Putin’s warmongering or the climate emergency”, he stressed.

“Spain and Italy, two sister countries that represent the third and fourth largest economies in the EU, have the responsibility of working together to take advantage of this opportunity and get closer to the dream of a more united and fairer Europe”, Sánchez assured.

Despite the fact that Pedro Sánchez and Giorgia Meloni are at ideological antipodes, in Moncloa they have warned that in this first bilateral meeting between the head of the Spanish Executive and the Italian prime minister there has been no attempt to highlight the confrontation politically. “We do not come to highlight the differences, we come to weave consensus”, they have insisted. Sánchez himself has repeatedly warned, inside and outside Spain, of the danger that, in his opinion, the irruption of the extreme right has in governments and European institutions. But, in this first meeting in Rome between Sánchez and Meloni, leader of the post-fascist formation Hermanos de Italia, the Spanish president wants to focus on the priorities for the semester of the rotating presidency of the European Union, which starts on the 1st of July. The relations between Spain and Italy, they assure in the Moncloa, also transcend their respective governments and their political colour.